Lindsey Buckingham's Out Of The Cradle is a wildly impressive coming-out party

Lindsey Buckingham: Post-Mac Attack

The wayward Fleetwood singer continues on – solo

BY DAVID WILD

Rollingstone - Published June 25, 1992

I'm not trying to compete with Kris Kross now, just like I didn’t try to compete with Christopher Cross in the old days.”

Lindsey Buckingham – the pop genius and sonic architect behind Fleetwood Mac‘s string of platinum successes in the Seventies and Eighties – is sitting under a velvet Elvis portrait in his home studio in the lovely hills of Bel Air, California. Buckingham has spent a substantial portion of the last four years in this room. Now, however, he’s finally on the verge of sharing with the public some of the music that he and Richard Dashut, his coproducer and writing partner, have been creating here, and he’s considering the question of how popular his eccentric brand of melodic pop will be these days.

“I guess it’s obvious that making this album hasn’t been an especially speedy process,” says the master of the understatement. “But I had to let a lot of emotional dust settle. People might think I’ve been off on some island getting my ya-yas out. The truth is, I’ve basically been here twelve hours a day. I’ve been goofing off only in the most productive sense.”

Asked if he’s grown sick of the windowless room, Buckingham pauses as if he hasn’t considered the issue before. “Well, I’m not really sick of it,” he says finally. “But I haven’t come inside here for a while, and I’m not sure why. A couple of weeks ago, I opened the door and just looked in. And I couldn’t relate to having spent the amount of time I did in here. This room became more my reality than the rest of the house. At times the whole thing seems like a weird dream to me.”

Buckingham pauses again and looks around the room. “You know,” he adds, “actually, I guess I am pretty damn sick of this place.”

Happily, all of Buckingham’s work has paid off. Out of the Cradle – his first release since he decided to go his own way and leave the Big Mac shortly after the release of 1987’s album Tango in the Night – is a wildly impressive coming-out party for the forty-two-year-old Buckingham. A veritable one-man show, the album is an artfully crafted song cycle whose romantic lushness is effectively balanced by a healthy dose of ripping guitar. More ambitious than the two solo albums he squeezed in between Mac projects – 1981’s Law and Order and 1984’s Go Insane – Out of the Cradle represents Buckingham’s finest work since 1979’s Tusk, the album that established a creative high-water mark for his former group. That album – the controversial follow-up to 1977’s Rumours, one of the best-selling records of all time – was also, according to Buckingham, the beginning of the end for him and Fleetwood Mac.

Buckingham and his then creative and romantic partner, Stevie Nicks, joined Fleetwood Mac in late 1974. At the time, Buckingham was already a “complete studio rat.” He first caught the bug when he set up a recording room at his father’s coffee plant, in Daly City, California, after dropping out of college in the early Seventies. Around the same time, he and Nicks started playing together with a Bay Area group called Fritz. They moved to Los Angeles in 1973, recording an album as Buckingham-Nicks the next year. “Our record company had no idea what to do with us,” says Buckingham. “They said something about wanting us to be the new Jim Stafford, and they wanted us to play steakhouses.” Opportunity knocked when Mick Fleetwood went to check out an L.A. studio and producer Keith Olsen played a track from the record he’d done with Buckingham-Nicks as a demonstration. Impressed, Fleetwood asked the pair to join his band a week later. It would prove to be a savvy decision. The reconstituted Mac – with Buckingham and Nicks joining bassist John McVie; his then wife, keyboardist and vocalist Christine McVie; and Fleetwood – debuted with 1975’s Fleetwood Mac, a multiplatinum smash that sold nearly 6 million copies worldwide, followed by the classic Rumours two years later.

Yet Buckingham says it was never an easy fit – though at first the tensions within the band fueled the music. “Fleetwood Mac was one big lesson in adaptation for me,” says Buckingham. “There were five very different personalities, and I suppose that made it great for a while. Obviously, having two couples – and soon enough, ex-couples – added a lot more tension and some great subject matter to the mix. But the problems really kicked in when you started adding five managers and five lawyers to the equation. Once Stevie was singled out and selected as the star of the band, the machinery of the rock business clicked in, and things really got stupid. By the time of Tango, you could hardly fit all these people in one room for a band meeting. It was a heartbreaking thing to watch, until it became almost comical.”

Musically, however, things just got better and better for Buckingham until the release of Tusk, an under-appreciated pop epic that met with a mixed response commercially, selling only 2 million copies. “It was a bizarre left turn,” Buckingham says. “But I knew if we made Rumours II that we’d have to make Rumours III and Rumours IV. We’d sold 14 million copies of Rumours [21 million worldwide], so we were in that mega-Michael Jackson area, and that’s a dangerous place to be. There was a big backlash. It wasn’t like the people around me at the time were saying, ‘Hey, Lindsey, let’s keep going in that interesting direction where we sell a lot less records than we used to.’ I really had the wind taken out of my sails, and I felt set adrift for a while.”

In 1982 the band returned to the top of the charts with the more user-friendly Mirage, but for Buckingham the thrill was gone. “It became more and more this big machine that had to have hits to keep working,” he says. “There was no room to grow. After Tusk, it was basically all disappointment for me. It became a soap opera.”

Partly in an attempt to give Fleetwood Mac a more fitting swan song, Buckingham and Dashut returned to help whip Tango in the Night into shape. In the end, that record became the group’s biggest album since Rumours, with sales of 8 million. Still, the experience was hardly an easy one. “It was a mess,” he says. “Whatever was going on in people’s personal lives, I can’t really say. I was never the one up all night creating shenanigans and high jinks anyway – I was the one who went up to my room to work on songs. But for whatever reasons, there was no camaraderie left. Just getting people in the same room to create more semblance of a group became a huge hassle. Especially with Stevie, who was probably around for something like ten days for that whole record.”

Buckingham’s split with the band came when he decided he couldn’t tour to support the album. “They’d smoothed things over and coerced me, and I’d kind of agreed to go,” he says. “Then I realized I just couldn’t do it. I called another meeting, and they were shocked and hurt. I knew they wouldn’t leave it at that, so basically you could say I was let go.”

The group added two new members, Billy Burnette and Rick Vito, in an attempt to fill the void left by Buckingham’s departure. Diplomatically, Buckingham says only that Behind the Mask – the 1990 record the group made without him – was “not an album I can say I took to heart.” Buckingham did, however, take to heart some of the slights meted out by Fleetwood in his 1990 tell-all tome, Fleetwood. “I didn’t read the whole book,” Buckingham says, “but I did skim it, and there were a lot of . . . untruths, shall we say. Mick was basically trying to underplay my contribution, but the thing that really upset me is the incident he describes of the night I left the band. He had this thing in there about me slapping Stevie. I mean, she probably deserved to be slapped. But it never happened that way. I don’t know what Mick was talking about.”

“Wrong,” one of the tracks on Out of the Cradle, was inspired in part by Buckingham’s reaction to Fleetwood. The rest of the album reflects Buckingham’s experiences with the group in a much more vague and positive manner. “There’s no sense in my hiding from the association,” he says. “I feel like fifteen years with Fleetwood Mac was like working on my thesis, doing research for some kind of paper. And I wanted to make an album that sort of put it all in a real healthy perspective with maybe a little more maturity in there somewhere. Because even though I feel younger than I did ten years ago, the fact is, I’m not eighteen and there’s no point in pretending I am.”

Buckingham decided to bury the hatchet with his former band mates and made a cameo appearance onstage at the end of Fleetwood Mac’s last concert in 1990. More recently, he agreed to work with the group on some new tracks for an upcoming box set, if time permits. “Going up onstage with them one more time wasn’t any sort of nail in the coffin for me emotionally,” he says, “because I already felt pretty detached. Still, the minute I saw Mick, the chemistry was still there, and that was pretty much the case with everyone. It was a gas.” As for the new songs, Buckingham says: “There’s no reason for me not to do it. I’d have to feel a lot of animosity toward those people not to work with them, and I don’t feel that way.

“I left Fleetwood Mac to make myself happy,” says Buckingham, “and fortunately it worked. That’s why I spent all this time in the garage – trying to make something that made me happy.” And though Buckingham says that “so much in my life is work right now,” he admits to having left the studio occasionally to spend time with longtime girlfriend Cheri Caspari, whom he met while making Go Insane.

Still, Buckingham says, he’s more than willing to leave his home long enough to support Out of the Cradle by hitting the road. “It’ll be great to get out of the studio, get some air and play with some other musicians,” he says. “In the Fleetwood Mac days we got used to the private jets and everything when we toured, but this time I’ll take the public bus if I have to.”

At the same time, Buckingham wouldn’t mind selling some records, too. “My other solo records were made quickly as sidebars to a more mainstream situation,” he says. “That’s not the case anymore, so there’s no point in my being esoteric just for the sake of it now. I’m certainly not interested in making a cheap-shot sellout. This is no longer the sideshow, this is the main event, and I hope there are hits on there somewhere.”

Lenny Waronker, president of Warner Bros. Records, Buckingham’s label, believes there’s no shortage of hits. “It’s the height of great songwriting and record-making,” he says, “and I think the power and quality of the music will bring people in.”

Buckingham named the album Out of the Cradle after the Walt Whitman poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” “The phrase just had a certain resonance,” Buckingham says. “Some people thought there was an unnecessary reference in the title to my leaving Fleetwood Mac, and I suppose you could make an argument for that. You could also argue that there’s something ironic and weird about a guy over forty thinking of himself as leaving any sort of cradle. But that’s the way it feels. And it feels very good.”

RECORDINGS VIEW; A Studio Wizard Takes a Psychic Journey

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: June 21, 1992
The New York Times

In "Street of Dreams," the most anguished song on Lindsey Buckingham's third solo album, "Out of the Cradle," the narrator visits the grave of his father, who has been dead for 10 years, and prays, "Will I ever stop dreaming dreams?" His father's ghost answers, "Never, never, never!" in a vengeful primal scream.

The tormented father-son dialogue, which revolves around the word "lonely," is cast in a dank, echoey setting that suggests Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" transformed into a surreal dirge. As much as any cut on "Out of the Cradle," it demonstrates Mr. Buckingham's brilliance at using the recording studio to create intricate interior dramas in which ambiance and an allusive pop sensibility matter more than the actual words and music.

The most elaborate and ambitious of Mr. Buckingham's solo recordings, "Out of the Cradle" is an album-length suite that describes a young musician's descent from innocence into a dark night of the soul and his eventual re-emergence into a slightly shaky autonomy. Mr. Buckingham plays most of the instruments on the record, which took two years to record in his home studio with his longtime collaborator and songwriting partner, Richard Dashut. His labors have produced one of the most exquisitely textured rock albums ever made.

The style that Mr. Buckingham has refined on "Out of the Cradle" is a personalized extension of the sound he devised for Fleetwood Mac in the late 1970's. The ultimate studio distillation of harmonized California folk-rock, his technique mixes carefully layered guitars and other stringed instruments with voices (both real and electronic) into a scintillating orchestral fabric. His master stroke has always been his ability to buoy these rich, three-dimensional textures with rhythms that have the feel of streamlined Celtic folk dancing. Their brisk, airy bounce keeps the productions from seeming overworked.

As the sonic architect of Fleetwood Mac, Mr. Buckingham used this studio wizardry to create the rock equivalent of a nighttime soap opera, starring the flighty, sexy Stevie Nicks and the stalwart, long-suffering Christine McVie.

The sound Mr. Buckingham has created for his solo albums employs the same ingredients but adapted to suit his passionate yet pinched vocal style. Where Fleetwood Mac's albums were glamorous comedies of manners, "Out of the Cradle" is one long, brooding interior monologue. The psychic journey begins on a note of frightened euphoria ("Don't Look Down"), takes a look at music-industry crassness ("Wrong"), then descends into despair ("All My Sorrows") and borderline insanity ("This Is the Time," "You Do or You Don't," "Street of Dreams"). With "Surrender the Rain" and "Doing What I Can," the narrator begins to recover, and the last songs, "Turn It On" and "Say We'll Meet Again," express an almost giddy affirmation.

Mr. Buckingham writes charming folkish melodies, and his best lyrics make serviceable use of archetypal symbolism, but his manipulation of instrumental atmosphere is what makes "Out of the Cradle" memorable. Mr. Buckingham's psychological changes parallel an exploration of his musical roots.

His influences range from Rodgers and Hammerstein (an acoustic instrumental rendition of "This Nearly Was Mine") to the Kingston Trio (a haunting adaptation of their version of the traditional "All My Sorrows") to rockabilly ballads ("Street of Dreams") to good-timey mid-60's folk ("Say We'll Meet Again"). "Countdown" momentarily echoes the Turtles, while "Soul Drifter," a gorgeous folk-cowboy song, ends with quotes from the Tokens' "Lion Sleeps Tonight."

The sum total of all these fragments, reflections and echoes is an impressionistic, if eccentric, memoir of his own painful loss of innocence and musical evolution.

REVIEW Stevie Nicks Oklahoma City 1983

Crowd's Actions Dampen Stevie Nicks' Concert

by Gene Triplett
The Oklahoman
September 19, 1983

When Stevie Nicks came prancing and swirling onto the Myriad Convention Center stage Saturday night September 17th to deliver a "Wild Hearts" concert, she found herself confronted with a crowd more akin to wild animals.

Some 200 rude and overeager fans surged toward the front of the stage when the rock songstress appeared.

She was resplendent in flowing, sequined red and black skirt and shawl, pirouetting to the rhythms of a magnificent rock 'n' roll band and singing her heart out.

Her hip, Welsh-witch image was never more entrancing.

But even Stevie's bewitching powers were not enough to calm the rowdy fans, who kept mobbing the front of the stage despite her pleas that they take their seats.

When the plywood barricade between audience and stage finally collapsed under the weight of the unruly throng, the star left the stage in disgust and the Myriad lights came up.

A burly stage hand stepped to the microphone and announced that "Stevie's feelings have been hurt. If you don't go back to your seats, Stevie's going to leave us."

The wilder members of the audience continued to mill about the front, despite warnings about angry fire marshals and an early end to the evening. The rest of the capacity crowd began to boo the troublemakers and long minutes of chaos dragged by.

Finally, Joe Walsh, who had opened the show with a well-received 45-minute set of hard-edged rock 'n' roll, strode to the center stage and roundly chided the disorderly mess of people at his feet.

"People are getting hurt," grumbled the usually good-natured guitarist. "That don't make it."

He delivered a short lecture about courtesy, then asked the errant fans to return to their seats "as a favor to me, OK?"

The rest of the audience thanked Walsh with thunderous applause, the troublemakers moved back and Stevie Nicks finally reappeared after a 15-minute delay.

Without further comment, she proceeded to wind her way through one of the finest rock performances the Oklahoma City audience has seen this year.

Her high, rough, sassy voice brimmed with emotion on tunes as varied as "Leather and Lace" with its delicate music-box charm, to the hard-charging rock 'n' roll suspense of "Edge of Seventeen" and the haunting, danceable rhythms of "Rhiannon," the song that brought Fleetwood Mac back to life.

Stevie's backup band was impeccable, an all-star lineup of sidemen that included guitarist Waddy Wachtel and Bruce Springsteen's pianist Roy Bittan. Wachtel's fiery guitar intro to "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" proved to be the show-stopper of the evening.

Walsh's opening performance was no less exciting, a typically light-hearted, yet hard-rocking performance that included "Life in the Fast Lane" from his days with the Eagles, "The Bomber" from his James' Gang phase and his own classic rock 'n' roll anthem, "Rocky Mountain Way."

It was a much classier performance than some in the audience deserved. Such destructive and uncivilized behavior is becoming more and more commonplace at Oklahoma City rock concerts.

Not only is it a sad commentary on the upbringing and manners of some of the local youth, it may also signal an eventual end to Oklahoma City appearances by quality acts like Stevie Nicks and Joe Walsh.

It's time some of us got our act together before it's too late.

Review Stevie Nicks Live in Philadelphia, PA June 27, 1983

Eccentric Nicks gives delicate concert

By Ken Tucker Inquirer Popular Music Critic 

Tuesday. June 28, 1983 

Philadelphia Inquirer

Stevie Nicks, who performed at the Spectrum last night (June, 27 1983), is a very unusual pop artist: an intensely mannered and eccentric performer whose mannerisms and eccentricity yield good music. 

Nicks usually performs as part of the band Fleetwood Mac, but she has 'just released her second solo album, "The Wild Heart" (Modern), and her show last night concentrated on material from that new disc. 

For this tour as a headliner, she has assembled a first-rate band consisting of players from other groups, including keyboardist Roy Bittan, from Bruce Springsteen's E-Street Band: Benmont Tench, keyboardist from Tom Petty's Heartbreakers, and drummer Liberty DeVitto, the best thing that ever happened to Billy Joel. Together with lead guitarist Waddy Wachtel, this band played a lot of harsh, loud rock 'n' roll that was a nice contrast to Nicks' reedy, delicate voice. 

Nicks' entire style of performance can, in fact, be described as delicate. In her wispy gowns and in the fluttery, flyaway dance steps she executes onstage, Nicks plays up the dreamy aspects of her music. The songs she writes are full of wise, young witches, bold princes and glowering monsters — this is fairytale rock 'n' roll delivered with roiling melodrama. • 

What keeps it all from becoming too coy, however, is Nicks' penchant for creating firm, commanding melodies that bolster her woozy lyrics. At the Spectrum, she gave bright, unsentimental readings of hits such as "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around," "Leather and Lace" and the current "Stand Back." In the end, Nicks skittered along the lip of the stage, accepting bouquets and squeezing the hands of gawking admirers, and as always, her apparent sincerity and guilelessness was impressive. 

Preceding Nicks this evening was singer-guitarist Joe Walsh, whose billing on this tour is bigger than an opening act but smaller than co-headliner. 

Walsh is a man in the midst of change: His old group, the Eagles, has disbanded, and so he's testing his solo wings by touring to promote his new album "You Bought It, You Name It" (Full Moon/Warner Bros.). This record is a desultory affair that doesn't begin to hint at the tough-guy good humor and sharp guitar. playing of which Walsh is capable. 

Walsh's performance last night was charming but slight, with one exception - a terrific, extended version of his finest composition, "Life's Been Good," probably the most honest, and certainly the funniest, life-of-a-rock-star saga any musician has recorded.

BILLBOARD Boxscores

Headliner: Stevie Nicks

Opening Act: Joe Walsh

Spectrum, Philadelphia,Pa.

Produced by: East Coast Concerts

Ticket Price: $12.00 & $13.50

Available Tickets: 14,949

Tickets Sold: Sellout

Concert Gross: $189,340

Setlist:

1 Gold Dust Woman

2 Outside The Rain/Dreams

3 Gold And Braid

4 I Need To Know

5 Angel

6 If Anyone Falls

7 Leather And Lace

8 Stand Back

9 Beauty And The Beast

10 Gypsy

11 How Still My Love

12 Stop Draggin' My Heart Around

13 Edge Of Seventeen

14 Rhiannon

Listen to the Concert

A Conversation with Lindsey Buckingham 1981

A Conversation with Lindsey Buckingham 

By SAMUEL GRAHAM

Record World November 28, 1981

LOS ANGELES - Lindsey Buckingham's "Law and Order" (Asylum) is not the first solo album by a member of Fleetwood Mac; Mick Fleetwood's "The Visitor" (RCA) and Stevie Nicks' "Bella Donna" (Modern) were both released earlier this year, while Christine McVie had an album under her maiden name, Christine Perfect, more than ten years ago. But as good as the others are, "Law and Order" is arguably the best of the lot. Sometimes quirky and tongue-in-cheek, sometimes lovely and serious, it is always affecting. What's more, "Law and Order" is genuinely a solo album, as Buckingham handles all the vocal and instrumental work on nearly every tune. In the following conversation, Buckingham discusses both his own and Fleetwood Mac's forthcoming records, among other topics. 

Record World: Your solo album seems almost to have grown out of a hobby, as if you were tinkering in the studio and found you had enough strong tracks to make a whole record. But is it something that was formally planned all along? 

Lindsey Buckingham: I was thinking about it about the time we (Fleetwood Mac) got off the road (late last year). We needed to take time off anyway; we'd been touring and making albums, and touring and making albums and touring, more or less straight for four or five years, or whatever it was. It was all part of a plan, to have the time to do solo albums; I think Stevie (Nicks) knew she wanted to do that, and I did, too. After October ('80), I got the equipment together. I got an inexpensive console, and I took the band's 24-track from the Village Recorder, where it'd been sitting ever since we'd finished "Tusk," which was about a year and a half; we found a room over in Burbank and just set it up in there. I did all the engineering for the first half, and then Richard (Dashut) got in on the second half. But yeah, it was fairly well planned, and most of the songs had been somewhat prepared beforehand. 

RW: Was it not only planned but inevitable, considering how much you seem to enjoy working in the studio?

Buckingham: Well, I've certainly gotten something out of my system now, and I'm able to apply some of the things that I've learned in the last year to Fleetwood Mac as well, so I think one hand washes the other in that sense. I'm sure Stevie feels a lot better now (after her album), and less frustrated; she wrote so many songs, and never really had an outlet for all of that. And I never really had an outlet for the other side of what I like to do, which is engineer.

RW: If "Tusk" was predominantly any one member's album, though, it was yours. 

Buckingham: Yeah, you could have lifted the songs of mine off and made a solo album from that, and it probably would have made a lot more sense. 

RW: And it would have been not unlike "Law and Order." The fact that you're playing all of the instruments on most of this album suggests that you did the same thing on some "Tusk" tracks. 

Buckingham: Yes, I did. I think I succeeded more on "Law and Order;"there's a certain smoothness that wasn't there on "Tusk" in terms of the drums, and I got it to sound a little more energetic, which is one of the things I thought I failed on with "Tusk" - but that may have its own charm, too. "The Ledge," "Save Me a Place," "Not That Funny," "Walk a Thin Line" (all from "Tusk"): I played everything on those. But I was home a lot, you know; I was working on these things at home, and then I'd bring them in more or less finished, and we'd crank 'em up and put 'em through the board - it was very exciting. It was a great process of evolution.

RW: How does it work? How do you build a solo track from the ground up?

Buckingham: You pick a tempo that you like, and you record a metronome, a click track. On a lot of the songs, I played drums first; I'd just choose the arrangement and play the drums first, then add everything else. I don't know how McCartney does his stuff, or Todd Rundgren, or Prince, but that's the most typical way that I do it. You know how Mick (Fleetwood) will hesitate to the beat, or Charlie Watts, playing slightly behind the other instruments. You really have a problem doing that if you put down the drums first; then you have to try and play everything else too fast, to try and get that tension. But what I did was, I'd record the click track on track one, then I'd send it through a delay - like maybe 30,40 milliseconds - and record the delayed click track on track 24. Then I could play the drums to the click on track 24, and play the other instruments to the click on track one - which is slightly ahead - so you'd get the tension. 

RW: That must have been a riot, building that way and adding whatever you want as you go along. 

Buckingham: It's interesting, the ways there are to work. In a sense, doing it that way, you really have to surrender to the work a little bit, and let it lead you; it's a very intuitive thing. But at the same time, you're searching for control as well. 

RW: What else did you play on the record besides guitar, bass and drums? 

Buckingham: There was some acoustic keyboard work done in the second phase (of recording). Basically, the only electric keyboard that's on there is one of those little Casio -Tones; it costs 200 bucks for this two -and -a -half-octave thing that has 50 different sounds on it. I wish they were around when we were on the road. There was also a lot of half-speed guitar stuff, the stuff that tends to sound like mandolins, like the high, airy guitar lines on "Trouble." The guitar was recorded at 15 IPS (inches per second), and the (basic) tracks were recorded at 30.

RW: Were there any songs on "Law and Order" that were originally intended for a Fleetwood Mac album instead? 

Buckingham: Well, actually, there is a song on the (new) Fleetwood Mac album that I thought was gonna be on mine. One of the drawbacks of "Tusk," in working so much at home, was that I isolated myself somewhat; the best working atmosphere that could have been created in the studio was absent at times. If anything, I provide the band with enthusiasm in the studio, and I think there's probably something missing when I'm not there. That was a bit of a drag, and because of that, I wanted to really come in (to the new group album) with guns ablaze in the studio, and show them that I was ready to work and give everything I could give on all levels. In order to do that, I realized that couldn't just save the best stuff for my own album; anything that seemed particularly suited for Fleetwood Mac should be used if it was needed, so I yanked one of the real uptempo songs that I liked - sort of a cross between "Go Your Own Way" and "Second Hand News" - and we used it for Fleetwood Mac. 

RW: So you don't have a huge warehouse of old songs that were never used for Fleetwood Mac and ended up on "Law and Order." 

Buckingham: No, not like Stevie does. And sometimes, quite frankly, you get a little reticent about pulling out old stuff, because if it didn't get done to begin with, there's probably something about it that wasn't happening. For me, at least. I tend to want to look forward more, which can also be a mistake. 

RW: Beginning with some of the songs on "Tusk," you've developed a humorous, kind of wacky style that's apparent in tunes like "Johnny Stew" and "Mary Lee Jones" on your own album. A few years ago you weren't putting much funny stuff on records. 

Buckingham: No, but I didn't feel too funny in those days. I don't know. Odd as it may seem, it isn't as obviously humorous to me now as it obviously must be. "Johnny Stew" is humorous, but ... 

RW: It's really the way you attack - and "attack" is the word - the songs now that come off as funny. It's a kind of raw aggression that sometimes seems humorous, whether intentionally or not. 

Buckingham: You're right. I've heard people say that "Bwana" (on "Law and Order") is humorous, but I never would have thought it to be at the time. I can see it conjuring up sort of a cartoon -land visual, but beyond that, I was seeing it more just as a compilation of various styles from the '40s to the '50s. 

RW: But you know, it wouldn't be funny if it weren't also effective and pleasant to listen to. 

Buckingham: I'll try to do a serious album next time. 

RW: When "Tusk" came out, people in the business were upset that it wasn't another "Rumours"; they expected another super-commercial album, which "Tusk" certainly was not. Do you think people have "gotten over" the album by now?

Buckingham: I don't know. I think that it sort of sunk in slowly to a lot of people who were originally put off by it; hopefully, that will continue to happen. Most of the retrospectives that I see, comments from critics, are basically that one of the good things about it was that we didn't play it safe. I don't know what the mainstream thinks; I don't even pretend to know what the mainstream is. Most of the reviews I saw of "Tusk" were good when it came out, but it wasn't the critics who were buying the album. 

RW: If the new album is more conventional, you know people will say, "Well, Fleetwood Mac knows they blew it last time, so they've made another 'Rumours.'

Buckingham: It's not going to be another "Rumours." It's a good reconciliation of opposites. There was a tendency even within the band, when it became apparent that the commercial impact (of "Tusk") wasn't going to be that of "Rumours" -and who's to say what it would have been anyway, even if it was like "Rumours" - to sort of turn around and look at me. What was once a creatively exciting thing to them had become somewhat tainted by its lack of commercial success. 

RW: So there were some internal feelings about self-indulgence, and so on. 

Buckingham: But only afterward - that's the point. And it was only a relative lack of commercial success, four million double albums or whatever. It could have gotten totally reactionary (with the new album) and gone all the way back to the right, or whatever, but it hasn't. There's definitely a spirit of experimentation; you're going to hear some sounds that are definitely far beyond "Rumours." But the arrangements, the vocals - it's more of a group effort. I haven't heard everything together yet, but Christine's stuff especially is some of the classiest I've heard from her yet. 

RW: It was great to hear "The Farmer's Daughter," the old Beach Boys song, on "Fleetwood Mac Live." Are there any more covers planned? 

Buckingham: We did do a version of "Blue Monday," the Fats Domino song, for this, but I don't know whether it will go on. We've got about 20 songs this time, and we're not going to put out a double album again - that, ah, might not be wise. 

FLEETWOOD MAC GOES BACK TO WHERE THEY ONCE BEGAN

LONDON: Their current world concert tour has taken Fleetwood Mac to Great Britain and Europe for the first time in five years, and will bring them to Japan and Australia for the first concert tour before this year is out. In their adopted homeland, American fans fiave been swarming to Fleetwood Mac shows. The June 29 and 30 gigs in New York’s Madison Square Garden were sold out more than a month in advance. While the current U.S. touring is an expected success, their return to the-continent is to re¬ introduce the group to a home country that had largely forgotten that Fleetwood Mac ever existed.

Promotional visits often seem to achieve little, for Fleetwood Mac the trip home paid big dividends. The year-old ‘Fleetwood Mac’ album which had till their return sold less than 10,000 copies, crept into the album charts. A few months later, the follow up album, ‘Rumours’, leapt straight into the top ten. The single “Go Your Own Way” even gave the group their first chart entry since “Green Manalishi” in 1970, when Peter Green was still with the group. And, a major hit single seems likely before the year is out if the critical and popular reaction to their sell-out tour is any¬ thing to judge by.

When the two recent recruits, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined two years ago, the English trio of Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Christine McVie had already helped lay most of the foundations for today’s group (through albums like ‘Kiln House’, ‘Future Games’, and ‘Bare Trees'). What Buckingham and Nicks brought was a hitherto unachieved stability rather than any change of musical direction.

They also sealed the striking image of the group, and their “American” identity. For, while Fleetwood Mac’s visit was a homecoming, their first British dates in almost half a decade, it was less the return of triumphant Britishers than a first visit by California curios. Fleetwood Mac’s audience in Britain is the America lovers, the Los Angeles cult followers, not those who once championed the British blues band.

Mick Fleetwood was well aware of this, though he and the rest were surprisingly nervous and aware of the pressure on them at the first of three packed nights at London’s Rainbow Theatre. Earlier, Christine McVie had said she felt a sense of homecoming at Birmingham, her home town. But the most surprising reaction came from Stevie Nicks: “We obviously don’t need England from a financial point of view, but we need England, in that it's still home for John and Mick and Chris, and if it’s home for them it’s our proxy home.”

“I didn’t want to come,’ she added candidly. On that last promotional visit Stevie had ultimately had a bad time, because throughout a day of interviews journalists repeatedly knew nothing of the new band and had nothing to ask her. Even at the lavish reception held for the group,, they were upstaged by the arrival of former leader Peter Green.

But whereas Green has since entered a further tragic stage in his career, he’s been committed to an asylum for the second time in five years, the Fleetwood Mac soap opera has taken an upswing for the group that today carries its name.

Stevie, on this visit, was besotted with would-be interviewers. Her, and Lindsey Buckingham have also had the satisfaction of seeing their three year old ‘Buckingham Nicks’ album be released in Britain and meet with critical success. Lindsey even spoke of their possibly recording another album outside of Fleetwood Mac itself.

Today Fleetwood Mac needs no re-introduction to mother country fans. The only calls for “Albatross” and “Dust My Broom” are from a boozey minority. The triumphs and shouts are for new numbers like “Rhiannon” and “Go Your Own Way”. Their performances are as exhilarating as their music in cold wet London towne, for Fleetwood Mac returned home with their own brand of warm California easy listening rock.

—Mick Houghton

Circus Magazine July 21, 1977

Review Fleetwood Mac Nov. 27, 1975 Santa Monica Civic Auditorium

Ben Edmonds

Record World

December 20, 1975

LOS ANGELES - It's exceedingly rare that a group can undergo constant changes of personnel and maintain any semblance of qualitative consistency. It's rarer still when a group can not only continue to grow under the weight of those circumstances but actually achieve commercial and aesthetic heights untouched by any of its previous incarnations. Such a band is Fleetwood Mac (Reprise), and their Thanksgiving night performance at the Santa Monica Civic indicated that their tremendous 1975 boom in popularity has been anything but accidental, and represents in fact only the preliminary heights that this present- ensemble is certain to rise to. 

Against a stunningly tasteful backdrop designed by Christine McVie, the group delivered a lengthy set that could've been twice as long and probably wouldn't have exhausted the audience's enthusiasm. Quite simply, it was as satisfying as any musical experience I've had all this year. Yes, you heard me right. The factors that pushed this performance past mere greatness were a) the band's ability to sustain intensity through the entire show (as opposed to the favored rock formula which says you push it at the beginning and then save it 'til the end), b) their ability to be a band at all times in a given situation where every one of them is a star, and c) the full integration at last of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. 

Though reserved and somewhat stiff in their early association with the band, the two newest members are now comfortable and confident enough that their performances match the fluidity and power of their musical contributions. They're now using up all that open stage space that they, as the frontpeople, are obligated to fill effectively if the show is to work. Stevie Nicks has developed into the kind of performer who elicits hard responses the way she previously generated only fascination. The audience liked her so much that they even shut up for her when she sang the acoustically backed "Landslide," quite a gesture indeed from a crowd that spent the rest of the evening vocally responding as if this was the last concert they were ever gonna be allowed to attend. 

Stevie's "Rhiannon" is probably the single most played track from their most recent (and best! and gold on top of that!) album, and the group's live treatment takes into account all of the rhythmic/ melodic qualities that make it such a pleaser on the LP but brings to it a power that the album version doesn't even begin to tell you about. On this and his own "I'm So Afraid," Lindsey Buckingham offers the most passionate explanation of why he should be considered certainly the most exciting guitarist Fleetwood Mac has ever boasted and, in time, may prove to be its best. His solo flights play soaring clusters of notes against dynamic chord bursts, never forgetting that the key to being a great lead guitarist is understanding how to be a great rhythm guitarist first. Where he at one time seemed totally self-absorbed, he's now matching his electrifying playing with a visual aggressiveness that's a pure delight to see at work.  

Buckingham's energy puts a much more forceful spotlight on the rhythm section of John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, and it's revealed to be the best pairing active in rock & roll, bar none. The restricted blues framework of the first Fleetwood Mac often required little more than the competence of its rhythm section, but the band's current wealth of diversified talent encourages them to make a more fully personalized contribution. This ongoing redefinition has provided the cutting edge that's made the difference in Christine McVie's songs between nice tunes and hits. "Over My Head" sounded like the hit that it so deservedly is; the band has come to terms with her pop inclinations in a way that accentuates her direct simplicity rather than following it. Based on the way the band presents her songs these days, it's a safe bet that her song catalogue is going to become valuable property in the coming months. 

It would be vastly incorrect to assume that Fleetwood Mac's newfound energy is supplied by the newcomers alone. The wonderful thing about this band now is that the push comes from all five directions, and it accounts for the equal revitalization of the older songs included in the set. Not only the standard favorites like "Green Manalishi," but rarer gems like "Why" and "Hypnotized" which are actually developed further toward the songs they could be than when they were first recorded. The only song less-than-inspiring was "Oh Well," which they could just as easily delete anyway. Their new personality is finally powerful enough that their audiences no longer feel pressed to relive the "hits," freeing the band to select only the best songs from their back catalogue, if they choose to do any old material at all. 

What they left their audience with above all, however, was a hunger for the great things that are going to be created by this band; the future that, after eight years, has finally opened up for Fleetwood Mac. If their next album can incorporate the dynamic energy of their live performances without sacrificing any of their studio discipline, then it's gonna be all but impossible to find a better band than Fleetwood Mac.